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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

I've never had problems with VLC, and I've used it off and on for 20 years.

I don't doubt that there's some obscure, elite videophile hate towards it, but I'm hardly going to stop using it because a few random internet strangers hate on it.

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Kinda the problem with anecdotes isn't it? :)

My own anecdotal experience with VLC was that while every update fixed something, they also broke something in return - and these updates were common. This got annoying enough at some point for me to hop ships, and so I switched to mpc-hc and never looked back.

I've since also tried (and keep trying) the to-me still newfangled mpv, but I'm not a fan of the GUI or the keybinds. I know it can be customized, but that's not something I'm interested in doing. I know there are alternative frontends as well, but I checked and they're not to my liking either. So I mostly just use it for when mpc-hc gives out, such as really badly broken media files, or anything HDR.

Out of pure curiosity, what kind of things were you VLC using for, for it to break so often? I'm almost never doing anything with video, so I'm completely clueless in this field.

I don't recall my issues being media file or workload specific [0]. It was specifically just general frontend stuff I believe [1]. Although I should probably also mention that I don't remember much to begin with, other than my decidedly negative conclusion that made me switch players, and the overall personal narrative around that. It's been quite a few years if not a whole decade.

[0] Doesn't mean there weren't any, but then I was not doing anything special. Just watched anime, listened to music, streamed YouTube. Hardly an extraordinary workload for VLC, or indeed any media player in general.

[1] I remember them changing around the volume slider widget back and forth ad nauseam for example, and that becoming in some particular way defective that I cannot recall.

Thanks for the reply, yeah that's interesting, I remember also having issues with VLC as a kid (I'm in my late 20's now), but I always chalked it up to me being a noob and not knowledgeable, I wonder retrospectively how much of that were actual me-issues and how much VLC-issues. Recently one of my parents wanted to play a DVD via VLC which did not work, where the issues ultimately was missing DVD libraries which apparently can't be shipped in Ubuntu due to licensing issues (libdvdcss). 12 year old me wouls not be able to debug this issue to be honest.

And you think everybody else should stop using it because you had problems?

I'll make up my own mind on it.

Do you think everyone else should start or continue using it because you never had problems?

Let's be kind. Clearly not what either of us were thinking or intended to convey.

You should make up your own mind. why bother reading comments at all? why bother reading reviews? I bet you watch every movie and never comment on how good or bad they are because you'll be telling everybody else what to do and that would be hypocritical. I wonder how you stumbled upon VLC in the first place - perhaps you read about it somewhere and followed that advice?

Where did perching_aix say that?

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